“You feel like drawing?” Silas asked.

Rob took his notebook from the tilted shelf and arranged it on the fur-covered beanbag on the floor. He grabbed his sleeve of colored markers, lay on his stomach, and turned the notebook’s thick pages until he found a blank one.

“Oh wait,” Silas said. “Can you flip the record before you settle in?”

Rob got to his knees and reached for the stereo. The record on the turntable was still Helen Reddy—the same record since Sunday. He turned it over and set the needle down on the whirling black rings. The record, like all of Silas’s, was slightly warped, so the needle rose and fell as if traversing a tiny obsidian landscape full of hills and valleys.